The Ultimate Energy Saving Tool: Trust

October 10, 2009

Here is an odd leap from the abstract to the concrete. It will make sense, though, if you follow the thinking. Trust me.

To found a construction project in trust is to save money (and energy, more on this later). This I know in my bones from having lived on projects founded in trust, that go on to be successful by all the usual measures: budget, function, grand opening dates, reputation of the facility, reputation and profitability of the organizations that put it up. On the other hand are projects shaped by people who are niggardly in advancing trust to the undertaking, where collapse and failure is the inevitable, miserable result.

Rex Miller et. al. just published The Commercial Real Estate Revolution, which I've just begun, but can already tell is on target about much of what ails the construction industry, described by the book as "broken." On the first page Revolution claims there is a 50 percent waste factor in the $1.3 trillion U.S. construction market (need more proof though to swallow that 50 percent number). And that a good portion of the waste results from lack of trust.

Appliance Makers are the Good Guys

September 15, 2009

Toby Considine calls himself an "integrator of the un-integratable." He works as an infrastructure analyst, an in-house consulting resource to the Facilities Services group at the University of North Carolina and occasionally advises building owners and engineering companies on business strategies.

In a recent blog, Energy Collisions and Autonomous Appliances, he points out that appliance makers, "are starved for information," particularly when it comes to pricing energy in applicances that work in a smart grid. As Toby sees it, the appliance makers are the good guys and the energy suppliers the curmudgeon defenders of old world, fixed-price electricity. The energy suppliers need to give it up, and provide the price signal information the appliance makers crave.

How to Buy the Road

September 12, 2009

The mileage fee is a sensible plank that belongs in any platform developed to remake the way we use energy. Among its other virtues, the mileage fee creates a way to incentivize efficient use of a constrained resource: the road.

In Bern Grush's blog dedicated to exploring the mileage fee (where he responds to this old PowrTalk post) he identifies a complex of purposes that would try to shape road policy, then argues that the mileage fee is the one tool capable of addressing them all:

Code Green

August 30, 2009

LEED is a voluntary system to measure how sustainable a building is. In my happy thinking, LEED was a stepping stone that would simply dissappear once its underlying benefits were widely understood (we choose to build green because logic compels it). The more sensible evolution, though, might be to codify those parts of LEED that have broad, implementable benefit. 

Truth is, in the budget and time constrained world of the construction project, we don't always do what logic compels, but we do tend to do what the building code compels. For example, the International Building Code (used for much of what gets built in the US), requires fire sprinklers in most buildings. And while we know in our bones that fire sprinklers save lives and reduce property damage at a level that probably matches cost (and human life is worth...?), sprinklers would be on the budget chopping block for many projects were they not required by code. 

So those pieces of LEED that prove to have irrefutable societal benefit could be moved from the voluntary, experimental world of LEED to enforceable code, so that they would not be sacrificed on the twin altars of the deadline and the budget. LEED could continue to serve indefinitely as a testing lab for the development of code-worthy sustainable construction practice.

Here's one article on the anounced collaboration between the US Green Building Council (LEED) and the International Code Council (International Building Code) to develop a model green building code.

Photo: Georg Hoermann on flickr

[Post-script: Here's the original editorial that prompted the post: Why the World Needs Another Green Building Standard ]

Ford CEO Paints the Future Electric

August 17, 2009

NPR's interview with Ford CEO Alan Mulally this morning painted a titillating vision where captains of industry coalesce around an electric car future. The wrap up to this morning's session with an American automaker was unfathomable even less than a year ago. Alan said this:

[go to the "Continue reading >" link below the ratings section]

Small Needs to Get Big

August 15, 2009

Forget big wind farms with their pesky transmission issues. Locally produced power is the way forward. (See the richly detailed argument made almost a decade ago in the compelling treatise Small is Profitable). Floundering efforts to get transmission in place for big wind farms highlight the wisdom of Small. 

T. Boone Pickens' $8B wind program is mucked in a transmission tarpit (okay, maybe among other issues as well). This Fast Company article plumbs California's similarly large, expensive, mired, maybe-someday transmission project Green Path North, and arrives at the same "power locally" conclusion.

Big Wind and Big Solar may pencil out as cost effective renewable energy solutions, but adding variables like government agency and NIMBY can wreck the cost equation, or, in a time equation, put them in the way back (back there with Nuke and Big Fossil Plant). Priced holistically and in the real world, distributed renewables might be best, and what we should be focusing on. 

Distributed renewables: an old idea to make powr cleanr soonr.

Photo: Darren Rogers on flickr. Also, check out Darren's stuff at RedBubble.

Matchmaking, Better Place and the Mileage Fee

June 21, 2009

Here's a little marriage that wants to be arranged: the Mileage Fee and Better Place's software platform.

The Mileage Fee offers a unique opportunity to put the traffic jam on a diet, and it is gaining traction as a way to deal with dissappearing gas tax revenues as people drive less, drive more fuel efficient cars, or eventually drive cars that don't use gas at all (read the preceding link commentary to feel the gaining traction part). To be deployed broadly, however, the mileage fee needs GPS systems to be manufactured into new vehicles.

Shrugging Atlas*

June 19, 2009

The weight of the world is on our shoulders these days it seems, considering the burden of the seemingly intractable energy issues we bear:  swelling populations that harbor swelling aspirations to dramatically increase their energy use, national security insecurities and doubts about the security of energy supply, the depletion of finite fossil fuel resources, climate change and the things we might not know about costs to the natural systems that sustain life, wild swings in the price of fuel. Ugghh.It's bad. Really bad.

But maybe bad is the best thing that could happen to us. Maybe being hemmed in by problems sets the stage for particularly excellent creative response. As Margaret Boden suggests in her Stanford treatise creativity and unpredictability: "constraints, far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking."

Twitter is the New Blue Jeans

June 16, 2009

The thing about blogging about energy is that you can talk about anything you want and it will somehow end up being a discussion about energy. 

It appears twittering is helping to do the dirty work of fomenting dissent, and dissatisfaction with the status quo, in oil-rich Iran. Like blue jeans helped to tear down the walls of the Cold War Soviet empire. 

Solar-Powered Sports Coliseum Gets Net A-Plus

May 31, 2009

Here's an idea for a power plant: the solar-powered sports coliseum. What if you skinned an entire stadium with solar such that it could satisfy its own ginormous appetite for power when filled with spectators, but when idle (which is usually often) its solar panels could still be at work, making and feeding electricity to the grid? Sports facility as power plant. A colossal idea not likely to be done anytime soon; a rich fantasy beyond the pale.